Previously on Board Game Clubbing… I have never played Settlers of Catan. Catan, along with Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne, are understood to be the gatekeepers to the fabulous world of board gaming. Play these board games three to pass through the doorway made of the decaying flesh of the nerdiest-nerds. These rancid nerds scare off the people trying too hard to look cool but those of us who care not about such vanity are...

This post forms part of The List. The List is where the worst parts of gaming belong: those errors that designers and publishers repeat, over and over again; those aspects of the hobby, and of the culture surrounding it, which embarrass and shame us. Compiling the whole List would be impossible – no one person could ever hope to detail all that is rotten in the kingdom of board. But we can point to its lowest, most worrying points – a...

Judging by the amount of board gamers I speak to on forums and social networks, of all the copies Arkham Horror sitting in people’s collections, probably about half of them are sitting unplayed in cupboards. The most common reason – nay, excuse – that I hear for this is that, “it’s too scary”. Not in a thematic sense either; it’s that it is regarded as an impenetrable web of complication. Well to be fair, Arkham Horror is...

I’d like to introduce you to Linda. Linda isn’t very popular, she’s encrusted in filth and unspeakable foulness, her stench tends to make people uncontrollably retch. She has some terrible manners and eating habits, so making friends is very hard for her. Linda is sad. I should also mention Linda is about 20 foot tall, has a gaping maw lined with teeth, three legs, three tentacles, oh and no arms or eyes Linda is an...

So yeah, I got my arse handed to me. It was a good few hours of cards, and I got a random prize of a deck box but, for me, it’s just compounded how much the game needs to be steered away from the few decks that people are playing. I’ve seen the Murloc, blue Hunter and blue Druid decks so many times over the last few months that it’s harking back to older days before Cryptozoic took over from Upper Deck where there were only a few...